Yoga at work – why give it a go?
Whether you go alone or get the rest of your office involved, yoga classes help lighten the load of the working week. With numerous benefits including reducing stress, boosting energy, improving posture and generally being great for wellbeing, yoga at work improves each day.
Benefits of yoga at work
You might not have tried yoga before or be very experienced. But the working week is a great place to make time for yoga and to cultivate your practice. The benefits of yoga at work can improve your mood, relieve pain, and help you move around with more ease.
Here are 8 reasons to give yoga at work a go this year:
1. Melt away stress
Yoga teaches us to use our breath, slow down, and listen to our bodies. The act of mindfully moving and focusing on our breathing helps reduce daily anxieties and melt away stress.
Every job comes with its daily hassles and yoga provides a healthy antidote that goes beyond the class itself. Whatever time you can make for yoga at work – before, after or at lunch time – you carry the stress relieving benefits of your class with you for the rest of the day.
2. Get light exercise
Fitting exercise and commuting around your work and home life is a struggle. A workout at lunch sounds like a great idea, but when do you eat, shower, and cool down? Yoga slots in nicely because, depending on what class you choose, you don’t need to shower. You feel the benefits of a quick yoga class without sweating buckets and still feeling the burn in your muscles.
3. Improve your posture
Lots of us sit at a desk for our working day, and most of us do it without countering the effects of desk work. Do you ever notice your neck/shoulders/lower back feeling tight and stiff?
It’s most likely from leaning over your desk. Yoga at work is brilliant for stretching out tight muscles and strengthening postural muscles, to be able to sit more comfortably at our desks. Get back from a yoga class at lunch, and you’ll immediately notice the difference.
4. Boost energy levels
The act of moving and stretching while breathing deeply energises your whole body. Yoga gets the blood oxygenated and flowing, improving circulation, concentration, and boosting your energy levels. A short class clears your mind and awakens joints and muscles, helping you feel more focused and productive when you head back to your desk.
5. Listen to your body
When we’re busy, it’s easy to forget about caring for our physical bodies. Yoga teaches you how to slow down, even just for a moment, and listen to your body. Notice how you’re feeling and connect with the physical sensations going on within your body. Learning to recognise when we’re feeling out of sorts and attend to this enables our bodies to better serve us each day.
6. Spend time with colleagues
There’s no doubt that an evening in the pub is a great team bonding exercise that brings lots of us together. But it’s nice to do something different and something that can include those who don’t go to the pub often. Yoga at work is a brilliant team activity.
You could go to a local studio on lunch or bring a yoga to your office building. Offering private classes for your team, held within your own building or at the studio, is a perk many will enjoy. It has the bonus of bringing an element of calm and relaxation into everyone’s day.
7. Slot it into your schedule
The beauty of yoga is you feel the benefit of even a ten-minute practice sat at your desk. You don’t need a rigorous schedule of 5am wake ups to fit yoga it into your schedule. Start with as much or as little as you have time for. Classes that last 25 or 35 minutes are often just as rewarding as full classes and can be equally as challenging.
8. You might love it!
For those of us accustomed to dragging ourselves to the gym for punishing stints on the treadmill, the thought of taking up something new is tiring. But the danger of yoga is… you might love it. We can’t say yoga is for absolutely everyone, but it’s rare for people not to see the benefits to their body and mood after a series of classes. The only way you’ll know is if you try…
Are you interested in starting yoga at work? We have regular classes at our Leeds City Centre yoga studio.
We offer yoga in the workplace packages for Leeds businesses. Talk to us about creating a programme for your employees to reduce stress and improve wellbeing.